More About Haiti

Reaching into a wrinkled plastic bag in the tiny space of
his temporary home, Constant Pierre Dephane gathers what tools he has and gets
to work quickly, animated by today's addition to his few possessions. One of
more than 40,000 residents here in the sprawling Petionville camp in Port-au-Prince,
Constant plans to make good use of the tarps and other materials he received
today in a Catholic Relief Services shelter kit distribution. As he works, he
explains how he came to be at Petionville.

Constant Pierre Dephane builds a shelter in the Petionville camp after a shelter kit distribution, using tarps, rope and nails provided by CRS. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

"I came back here 16 days ago," Constant says. "This
was the only place I knew because I have relatives here."

When a massive earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January
12, Constant and his family were at home in the city. Rushing out into the
streets, they watched their house collapse, leaving them with nothing, Constant says. But with his own
family safe, his thoughts turned to his elderly parents who live in the town of
Aux Cayes, about five hours by public transport outside of Port-au-Prince. The
next day, he and his family went there. They stayed for over a month to care
for his parents.

But with no chance for work in the small town, Constant says
he was drawn back to Port-au-Prince, even knowing he had nothing to return to.
Salvaging what scraps he could from his former home, he led his family to a
clear patch of earth on what used to be the Petionville golf course, and what
today has become the largest camp for displaced people in the city. Erecting a
shelter of bedsheets and a piece of corrugated metal, Constant, his wife, his
sister and his niece crowded into a tiny 6-by-8-foot space. The shelter was far
from adequate.

"During the rain, the whole family stays up to catch
water in buckets," Constant says. "We just try to keep the rain out."

Having arrived late to the camp, Constant and his family
missed the large-scale shelter distributions carried out by CRS in the weeks
after the quake, when CRS reached more than 6,500 families in the camp with
critical shelter materials. Bagged at a CRS warehouse in the city and then
distributed to those most in need, each shelter kit contains
two plastic tarps, a length of rope, 80 nails and a tire inner tube, which is
cut up and used to keep the nails from tearing the precious tarps.

When CRS distributed a second round of shelter kits in the
camp, Constant was among the first on the list to receive one. He put it to use
within minutes of returning home to his makeshift shelter.

"I found nails, rope and tarps," Constant says. "I
will make the shelter bigger so we have more space."

Like many crowding Haiti's temporary camps, Constant is
industrious and creative. Over the next two hours, with the help of a friend,
he carefully measures out the largest space he can cover with his two new
tarps, using scrap wood as support posts. Disassembling his former shelter to
make maximum use of the materials at hand, he covers the new space with the two
tarps, and uses the bedsheets and scrap metal as walls, where rain is less
likely to leak in. When he is finished, he has doubled the size of his now
waterproof shelter, and created two rooms within the structure—one small
comfort to make life just a bit easier in the camp.

Soft-spoken but resolute, Constant spends little time
worrying about the future. With his home destroyed, at least he has a shelter
now to keep the rain off. Tomorrow, he says, he will see what comes.